Immigration enforcement by
local police will not make us safer from terrorism. Eroding the rapport between
communities and police will, in fact, make us less safe.Police need the cooperation of the
communities they serve and protect to collect information about suspicious
behavior so they can prevent terrorism and other crime.

·Community-based policing
is essential to effective local law enforcement. Local police rely on the
people in their community to provide the information they need to fight crime
and prevent terrorism. Immigrants who live in tightly-knit communities often
have information about the people around them that police want.

·Immigration enforcement
by local police undermines community-policing efforts. A local police
department that begins to enforce immigration laws will lose the trust of the
community it serves and protects. In communities where people are afraid to
talk to local police, more crimes go unreported, fewer witnesses come forth,
and people are less likely to report suspicious activity. Many immigrants come
from countries where people are afraid of the police, and police here have
spent years building trust that will be destroyed overnight. The loss of this
trust makes us all less safe.

·Even legal immigrants
and U.S. citizens will be reluctant to talk to police. Because immigration law
is complicated and always changing, many legal immigrants still worry that they
could be deported for reasons they may not have known about. Many immigrants
live in families of mixed status and would be afraid extra scrutiny may have
unforseen harm for a family member. There have been reports of even U.S.
citizens who were “deported” because they were caught up in sloppy enforcement.
Many successful community-based policing efforts have included express
statements from police that they were not investigating individuals’
immigration status.

·Even the mention that
DOJ is considering the use of local cops to check immigration status could be
exploited by criminals and terrorists. The bad guys seek to divide communities
with fear and distrust so they may act in secret, and they will play up the
situation to keep people from working together. Ignorance and misinformation
about the use of local police for immigration enforcement will take a toll,
even in communities that declare they will not use this authority.

The Constitutionality of
local police enforcing immigration law is in question. Now is not the time to
erode our fundamental principles, certainly not through public policies that
work against their very intent.

Local police departments
need to spend their limited resources on solving crimes and preventing
terrorism. The INS needs to focus its efforts on handling the job it has now
and on creating smart enforcement policies that actually work.

Local cops will be distracted from their primary
mission when they are asked to perform new duties for which they have no
training, compromising public safety and undermining effective immigration
enforcement. Let them spend their time on what they are trained to do
without additional mandates that are confusing as well as
conflicting.

Immigration laws are extremely complex, and INS
agents follow different procedures for arresting immigrants than for
arresting criminal offenders. Enforcing these laws legally and sensibly
requires intensive and expensive of training, but DOJ proposes to enlist
local cops without any at all. Without training, local cops have no hope
of adding to effective immigration enforcement and will undermine any
reasoned efforts that do exist. Requiring training will drain time and
resources local cops could better spend on solving crimes and preventing
terrorism. The Immigration Agent basic training is an intensive and
specialized 17-week residential course, and agents in the field complete
additional on-the-job training. Local communities can spare neither the
money for training nor the limited time of their police officers.

The INS itself has a history of inefficiency and
abuse and will shortly undergo a fundamental reorganization. How can this
agency lead local cops in an effort to enforce law and procedure they
themselves can’t handle?The added
burden of overseeing local law enforcement will only increase the chaos
and exacerbate INS’s already dysfunctional performance. Let the INS set
the standard for itself before it sets the standard for others.

Enforcement of immigration
laws by local police has a bad track record.

·Police forces that
understand they need the cooperation of all community members have wisely
declined to enforce immigration laws.Those that don’t have a bad track record.Citizens are not required to carry proof of citizenship, and
determining if an immigrant is legal can be a complicated process.Too often local police who try to enforce
immigration laws base their suspicions on race, ethnicity, or language.When they do this, they violate the civil
rights of citizens and legal residents, and they expose themselves to expensive
legal action.

·Many local leaders have
expressly condemned turning local cops into INS agents, among them prominent
mayors such as Rudy Guiliani and Michael Bloomberg of New York, Richard Riordan
of Los Angeles, and Richard Daly of Chicago.These leaders
understand the special dynamics between the people in their community and
police better than the Attorney General ever could. With one action, DOJ would
change these relationships for the worse, even if local leaders do not accept
this plan.